Duolingo

When it comes to character design, it is important to consider how a character may be perceived by a global audience. 🌎 When we designed the character of Vikram, we received some internal feedback that the design mirrored some of the harmful stereotypes of Sikhs that are portrayed in Bollywood films. So what happens when we make a mistake? We own up to it and try to rectify the situation. Although this was unintentional, it’s something that matters for us to get right. Language is deeply tied to culture, and representation matters greatly when we have learners all over the world. It’s also just the right thing to do. Because of this, two of the members of the Duolingo Design Department, Samia Khalaf and Derek Gieraltowski, led the charge to redesign Vikram in a more authentic way. 🙏 A heartfelt 'thank you' to the employees who spoke up and to the Duolingo Design Department’s dedicated and talented artists. Read more about the process of redesigning Vikram below. ⬇️ #duolingo #design

"I am still floored to this day that I met him on a language learning app. Who would have thought learning a language on a mobile app could bring you true love?" 💚 No, this quote from Amanda Lopez is not talking about Duo 🦉, she’s talking about her husband, Rob Ciesielski, whom she met on Duolingo in 2021! Amanda had been perfecting her Mandarin, French, and more since 2013, while Rob joined in 2020 to brush up on Spanish. The next year, Amanda started receiving congratulations from a Duolingo user, and was intrigued enough to look him up on Facebook! After exchanging messages and getting to know each other virtually, they finally met in person when Rob traveled to meet her family in the Philippines in 2022. They finally tied the knot in 2023, and will soon be moving to DC to start their lives together. From language streaks to wedding bells, Amanda and Rob’s story is a testament to love finding you when you least expect it. #onlyatduolingo #duolingo

☕️ Need a caffeine boost? In our Pittsburgh and NYC offices, we have the Green Bean Café. The design was inspired by the question, “if Duo made a coffee shop, what would it look like?” The Green Bean serves as a community space for Duos and visitors to grab their favorite drink, a smoothie, or try Duo’s featured drink (currently salted lavender latte in NYC and blueberry lavender macchiato in Pittsburgh). 😋 The Green Bean features fun design elements like coffee bean bags adorned with our characters and Duo being squished in a french press. Wanna grab coffee with Duo? Check out our ~60 open roles → https://lnkd.in/eiGY_mdW #onlyatduolingo #duolingo

We have a saying at Duolingo: Make it Fun. This applies to everything we do because we believe that learning doesn’t have to be boring and neither does work! We are always excited to find folks who bring a dose of ✨fun✨ to work. For example, Clark Munson from our Localization team, who was new to Duolingo at the time, was inspired by the Owliday party announcement a few years ago. He had a stroke of genius and couldn’t fall asleep until he wrote a Duolingo version of this classic. 🎶 Ryan from IT offered a hand on the guitar and voila! A musical masterpiece that they performed in front of the entire company. 💚 🎄 We pulled this special song from the archives to share with LinkedIn today. Enjoy! 🎅🏼 If working at Duolingo sounds fun to you, apply today: https://lnkd.in/eE5EpxwK #duolingo #onlyatduolingo

💰🌳 Would you want $1,200 as a reward for supporting the environment? Well, Duolingo’s Transportation benefit does just that! A few years back, we were paying for our Pittsburgh Duos’ (employees) parking passes, and we wanted to improve that Transportation benefit. So, we got kinda nerdy and ran an analysis on where Duos live and how they get to work. We noticed that most of our Duos lived only 1-2 miles away from the Pittsburgh office but still drove. 🤔 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗲 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘇𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝗻𝗼𝗻-𝗴𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗶𝗰𝗲! 𝙎𝙞𝙜𝙝. 😔 So, we redesigned our Transportation benefit to promote sustainable practices. Our Transportation benefit today is: across all offices, we provide reimbursement for parking / transit, but if you take an alternative method, you receive a $1,200 annual stipend (pre-tax). Over the past three years, ~25% of Duos have opted for the green choice 🤑, which folks have used for things like a bike, new shoes, ride shares, or yes, skateboards. Whatever your mode of transportation, across all our offices, we’ve got our Duos covered. #onlyatduolingo #duolingo

Sometimes we hear things about our company that have us like ⁉️, and they’re often the same questions. 🧐 (:𝟬𝟱) Do you really need to speak more than one language to work at Duolingo? 🤨 (:𝟮𝟰) Is Duolingo a huge tech company?! Or, is it a tiny, unprofitable startup?   🤔 (:𝟰𝟬) Can I only learn languages on Duolingo? Our co-founder and CTO Severin Hacker is here to help clear some things up. Check out the video 👇 #onlyatduolingo #duolingo

We issued a grand quest to our engineering team: reduce cloud spending without compromising our product. Every shiny feature demands resources to maintain, and many come with hefty price tags. Over time, these costs added up to millions of dollars a year! (We’d like to tell you the exact amount, but our lawyers said no. 😝) The result of our efforts? We raked in 20% savings (annualized) in just a few months, thanks to hard work from our engineers and third party tools like CloudZero! 🤯 Julie Wang and Virginia Cheng shared their key learnings from this effort. Read more at the article below ⬇️ #engineering #duolingo

We do serious work at Duolingo but don’t take ourselves too seriously. Our Product team is a perfect representation of this. Our Product Managers (PMs) ship features to over 500 million learners, run thousands of experiments a year, are always on top of it, AND they are practically stand-up comedians. When we asked our PMs what small wins they are celebrating, they came up with this list. What small wins are you celebrating this week?! #duolingo #onlyatduolingo #productmanagement

👀 Watch out Mickey Mouse, Duo’s butt is going to be more iconic than your ears some day. 🫢 Thank you Fast Company for writing about how we’re “setting a new playbook for the modern mascot—and dragging language learners along with him [Duo].” A few stats about us: ➡️ We went public in 2021 with 38M Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and 2M paying subscribers. ➡️ Today, we have more than 113M MAUs and 8.6M paying subscriptions, and Duolingo is the world’s most popular education app. ➡️ For the first nine months of 2024, revenue was up 42% year over year, from $380 million to $538 million.   Even with all of this success, Luis von Ahn, our CEO and Co-founder says, “The best is yet to come.” 💚 If you want to join a profitable tech company, apply here: https://lnkd.in/eR4dcWmj #duolingo #onlyatduolingo

The Duolingo Language Report analyzes data from millions of learners to see what languages people were excited about studying throughout the year 🪩 and the 2024 report just dropped! ⬇️ This year, we saw something happening with our English learners. 👀 English was the most popular language to study in more countries than ever before (135!!). Why are they studying English, and how does that differ from our English speakers who are studying other languages? You’ll have to read to find out 😏 (c’mon, we can’t give it all away): https://lnkd.in/e9QC2C-k #duolingo